


ghost

by miraphora



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 06:37:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12163497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraphora/pseuds/miraphora
Summary: Cassian goes three days without sleeping, huddled in the comms unit, monitoring chatter from his sector, communicating with sector heads from neighboring parts of the Outer Rim.





	ghost

Cassian has control of the Albarrio sector.

He’s got contacts on a planet in the sector who have been deploying some of Jyn’s Partisan techniques, trying to start a planet-wide revolution against the colonialist Imperial government.

The Rebellion receives a broken transmission late one night on the base they’re current stationed on.

Cassian receives it the next morning, and reaches out to contacts on other planets in the system.

The news is bad.

After three weeks of planetary riots and an assassination attempt on the Imperial governor, a Star Destroyer entered the system.

And commenced firing on the surface of the planet after all top priority Imperial personnel had been evacuated.

Cassian has lost operatives before, obviously.

He’s always been able to push past it before.

But these are people like his parents, they speak a language whose root is the same as his own, and the operatives stationed there, the contacts he has cultivated, are people, beings, that he has recruited himself.

He has trained them, himself, with Jyn at his side, investing himself and his time in their cause, in their freedom, and remembering in the process why he has given so much of himself to the Rebellion.

He goes three days without sleeping, huddled in the comms unit, monitoring chatter from his sector, communicating with sector heads from neighboring parts of the Outer Rim.

When Jyn sees the tic start under his left eye she knows he’s been using stims to stay focused, and that’s the last straw.

He came back once, only once, from a weeks-long operation barely two doses away from cardiac arrest and they fought in hissed whispers and intense glares for 20 minutes in the medbay before Bodhi showed up and talked her down and then sat down with Cassian for a few hours.

He told her he wouldn’t do it again.

She understands, though. she does. Saw Gerrera never went back for anyone, but Cassian comes back for her, and she goes back for him. Always. They protect their own.

She goes into the comms unit, face blank, ready for a fight, not caring that they’ll be observed.

He looks at her dully when she hunkers down in front of him and takes his hands.

“You have to let it go, Cassian. I need you to come back to me. You have to let it go.”

The lines beside his mouth are deep, strained, the wrinkles beside his eyes like a web of agony. His lips are pressed flat, cheekbones thin with stress. His eyes are hollow, bruised. He looks unwell.

“I can’t–” His voice cracks with disuse and dehydration. He’s been careless with his body in his obsession.

The weight of the eyes around them fades in the background. There’s a vague sense of relief. No one has known how to handle him, and Draven is off-world with Organa for a meeting.

He makes them nervous, like a ghost. Worse than the rumor of a spy, the physical presence of him, his manifestation of secrets and tension, leeches their energy.

Jyn curls one hand around the back of his neck, feeling the brittleness of him, the wavering strength, and pulls his head down until his forehead rests on hers. “I need you to be here. Come back to me. Leave it,” she whispers, the way he had done for her, again and again, when the weight of her ghosts and her fresh-slain dead threatened to drown her.

“Leave it.”

His breath gusts slowly, and she can taste the sourness of him, withering on the vine. He is so close to falling apart, but aside from a first instinctual tightening of his hands in her hand, he comes with her when she stands and pulls him up.

Slowly, because she knows after sitting so long his back will be tight, the pins that hold this toy soldier together cold with his lethargy and the recycled air in the comms unit.

His expression barely twitches, his exhaustion past pain and into a fugue. She thinks he must trust her very much, to ignore the eyes carefully ignoring them, the turned-away faces, and lowered heads as she leads him to the door.

He follows her through the base like a ghost to their quarters, drinks obediently when she holds a bottle to his lips, and tries to help her when she strips him down out of his uniform and into a faded jumper and pants. And when she joins him in the bed, he lays his head on her chest like a child, too empty even to speak.

She holds him like that for hours, while he breathes in the silence, and the coiling tension in his shoulders and neck begins to unwind, and he remembers how to be something other than a ghost.


End file.
